Isolated historical measures lose validity as social contexts shift

Evidence

Why were Sales’s measures less effective? In some cases, the social context and meaning of the measure has changed, as for sentences for rape and perhaps for interest in boxing and astrology. In other cases, such as police budgets and support for the death penalty, factors other than authoritarianism, such as actual crime rates, municipal labor agreements, or political persuasion, may exert effects on the measures, perhaps maintaining them at high levels. For these reasons of changing historical context and effects of other variables, then, isolated individual measures are likely to have limited historical generality. The researcher’s task is to identify and construct measures that may be functionally equivalent across time and social change. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 831

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A foundational methodological insight: measures must be functionally equivalent across changing contexts, not merely repeat the same operationalization — applies far beyond authoritarianism research to any longitudinal or cross-cultural measurement work.
• XREF: connects to: Time studies fail to accumulate because they lack systematic connection to general social theory — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 75